a rooskie in dublin

The Art Of The Possible!

By Irina Kuksova

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Every time I visit my father in Moscow I never fail to be surprised. My father has the most extensive collection of... of... I'm not even sure what they are. Electronic knick knacks is the best phrase I can think of for them. My father is a compulsive hoarder of gadgetry. And he has a genius for transforming it. All I know is that he can put those little pieces together and come up with a television, a computer, a fridge, anything you need.

But the process is slow. Mostly the stuff is left lying around while he figures out ways to use it. And anyway he's always busy repairing things for other people. So his own projects have to wait. Wait in a state of electrical limbo. We often wonder how many of his gadget innovations stay in the realm of the imagination for want of time to get to work on them.

My father is an artist. An artist of gadgets. He doesn't like to throw anything away. It's a vision thing. He can see endless possibilities where I see clutter. Where I see junk, he sees technological break throughs. The rest of us throw up our eyes at the bits and pieces occupying an unreasonable amount of space in his unreasonably small Moscow apartment. But his imagination is not confined by space and time.

Suggesting he get rid of even a fraction of his collection would be heresy. The notion would definitely fall on deaf ears. It would be like telling Michelangelo to get rid of a huge chunk of marble he was working on. So it takes up a lot of space, and guests keep stumbling over it. So what? Michelangelo knows that slab will soon be David. Just as my Dad knows one of his gizmos will shortly be a sputnik communications satelite. Okay the stone slab doesn't look like David yet, and Dad's gizmos don't cook. freeze, transmit pictures, or fly. But someday they might.

I always think what's really important to my Dad, and to many people with the same obsessive flair for collecting things, is not so much using the collection, as savouring the sense of possibility such a collection brings.

Back in Dublin I myself search for a sense of possibility in different realms. In books. And my collection takes up barely any space because I use digital downloads and can store whole volumes on my lap top. The rest of my collection comes via the Dublin City library from which I borrow at will.
But maybe my father's creative impulse hasn't entirely passed me by. Lately I've been thinking that instead of reading books, it's time I wrote one. Ireland has given me plenty of material. Now if I can only find the time to begin.